Keeping your ears on fire since 2010…

Beach Boys to Release Long Lost Album “Smile”

March 14, 2011

The Beach Boys’ 1966 album Pet Sounds has been long-lauded as one of the greatest albums of all-time. Complete with classics such as “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Sloop John B” and “God Only Knows,” the record’s influence was a beautiful compromise between the experimentation of the 1960s and commercial acceptability.

Brian Wilson's 2004 re-recording of the "Smile" material will be a far throw from the long-awaited release of the Beach Boy's original, recorded follow-up to Pet Sounds.

Fans of the record will be ecstatic to learn that the band’s incomplete follow-up album to Pet Sounds, Smile, will be released in its entirety by Capitol Records this year. Many of the lost tracks, recorded between 1966 and 1967, were deserted shortly after songwriter Brian Wilson’s mental health declined, leading to his own desertion of the band.

Although some of the tracks found release over the years through the Beach Boys’ subsequent albums, it was Wilson’s 2004 version of Smile that gave fans the chance to hear a potentially lost classic.

While Wilson’s 2004 release will serve as a starting block to this authentic chapter of the Beach Boy’s discography, the original track listing was never completed. Therefore, it wouldn’t be unusual for fans to embrace a totally new entity from Wilson’s solo venture.

The physical release will include a boxed set composed of four CD’s, two vinyl LP’s, two vinyl singles a 60-page book written by Beach Boys historian Domenic Priore. Passive fans not willing to drop big bucks on the boxed set can find solace in a two-CD set…or the free copies sure to be scattering the internet.

Regardless, there’s no doubt that the group’s original studio recordings should generate the same buzz that can reinvigorate the Beach Boy franchise and usher in a new generation of young fans.